I was born in Tel Aviv, 1954, third child of David, who immigrated to Israel from Lithuania, and Margot, who came from Germany, both prior to the Second World War. My father was the chief commander of Tel Aviv district Ezel (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and a member of its high command. After Israel was established he turned to commerce. My mother, a pediatrician, is still working. We grew up in a Revisionist home. My father was very close to Menachem Begin throughout the years and my mother was the Begin family physician. I studied at the Bilu religious-elementary school and then continued in a secular high school \u2013 Municipality A \u2013 in the science stream. My military service was in the \u201cParachuted Nahal\u201d and I fought in theYom Kippur war in Battalion 50. Discussions with fellow fighters led me to reconsider my right-wing upbringing. I found myself adopting a more leftist approach. I also took part in the first Lebanese War (Operation Peace for Galilee) in a reserve paratroop brigade which fought on the eastern front.<\/p>\n
In 1975-77 I studied and traveled abroad and then returned home to continue my studies in the Faculty for Computer Engineering in the Technion, graduating in 1982. From a young age I had wanted to be an engineer but at this point I decided to change direction. I wanted to work with people rather than with machines but mainly I felt a need to understand myself better. For my parents, engineering was a \u00a0practical and prestigious occupation, while the humanities were considered impractical.\u00a0 Once more I abandoned the principles on which I was raised, in the hope of crystallizing a new identity. In those days I started undergoing personal psychotherapy. In \u00a01985 I completed my first degree in Psychology at Haifa University. I was accepted for graduate studies\u00a0 \u00a0in Clinical Psychology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem but after a year I was found unsuitable and my studies were discontinued. I decided not to give up the dream I had begun and I continued my studies in psychology in a personal program. I was fortunate to study under Prof. Albert Solnit, Prof. Rivka Aiferman, and Prof. Zeev Klein, whose warm personality and breadth of view influenced me deeply. In 1987 I was accepted as a counsellor in the adolescent ward at Eitanim Hospital, which was directed with psychoanalytic orientation by the late Mr. Yoram Hazan. The impact of the ward and of Yoram on me was immense, and the experience evolved into my first novel License for Insanity<\/a><\/em>\u00a0which was published in 1994<\/p>\n In 1988 I married Hagar from Kibutz Ramot Menache, a guidance counsellor, and we have two daughters, Mor and Stav. In 1988 I was accepted for graduate studies in Clinical Psychology of the Child at Tel Aviv University and I graduated (M.A.) in 1991. I completed my internship in Talbiah Hospital and South Clinic in Jerusalem in 1990-94. During these years in Jerusalem I underwent psychoanalysis for eight and a half years with Neomi Aner, who is Kleinian by orientation. For a living I lectured on computers at the Hebrew University. In 1994 we moved to Haifa where I opened a private clinic from which I still work. In 1995 I graduated from a three-year psychotherapy course conducted by the Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute in Jerusalem. In Haifa I developed in three\u00a0 directions: working as a psychotherapist, lecturing in academia and continuing my writing. My novel The Arab Within<\/a><\/em>\u00a0won the Israel Writers’ Association\u2019s prize for book of the year, 2000. In the\u00a0 same year\u00a0Israel on the Couch<\/a><\/em> was published by Yedioth Ahronot. This was a\u00a0book in which I tried to integrate politics and psychology \u2013 the old love from my parents\u2019 home and a new love, which is my chosen profession. Here I wanted to say that not everything is as rational as politicians pretend or even believe it to be, and that we have to be aware of the emotional processes we undergo as a group and nation. I was looking for the integration of leftist and rightist positions because I felt that these two personality structures are equally necessary for any advancement in the peace process. This book was also published in English by SUNY PRESS and in German by\u00a0Patmos<\/a>. In the same period I also wrote Childland<\/a><\/em>\u00a0out of my exciting involvement with my daughters\u2019 childhood world. It is the story of\u00a0the eternal struggle of parents with their rebellious children in order to educate\u00a0them \u2013 or, more correctly, the eternal struggle of children with their<\/p>\n distanced parents in order to educate the latter.Together we created a huge model of Childland out of plasticine, which you can see on the book’s website. I read this book in my daughters\u2019 classes at school and the children were very involved. To this day the book and its spirit accompany the family.\u00a0Childland was published twenty years later in 2018 by the Steimatzky The family spent three years in the United States (2001-4) for my Ph.D. program in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. This was an enriching experience for all of us. There, I wrote\u00a0a Personality Study of Menachem Begin<\/em><\/a>\u00a0for my Ph.D. dissertation, trying to understand his multifaceted personality, which led him –\u00a0 and us \u2013 on his and our life journey, and which included high points as well as low ones. This book, published in Hebrew as Menachem Begin \u2013 A Portrait of a Leader<\/a><\/em> (Resling, 2006) and in English Menachem Begin \u2013 The Absent Leader<\/a><\/em> (The National Defense College, 2007)\u00a0won \u201cThe Menachem Begin Heritage Center Research Prize, 2004.\u201d<\/p>\n Back home in late 2004 I returned to my clinical work, to academia and also to my writings; but this time the focus was on multiculturalism. My acquired psychoanalytic listening skills, the ability to listen not only to the content but also to the music and the emotion, led me to investigate the different ways of thinking of diverse cultures. I assumed that there one could find the key to understanding other ways of thinking, different to our own. When I listened to an Arab leader saying something on the TV I would think to myself how we would articulate this phrase differently. I lectured for five years at the Arab Academic College for Education in Haifa, at Haifa University and also in other college courses dealing with cross-cultural psychology, and I instructed guidance counselors who worked with children from a variety of cultures (different Arab sectors, different religious sectors, Ethiopians, Caucasian and more). This work taught me how far western society is from being able to understand eastern culture, and vice versa – how we are quite ethno-narcissistic, knowing only our own cultural way of thinking and believing that all the world thinks like us. These years of research generated \u201cThe Cultural Code\u201d series in four volumes, which was published by Ben Gurion University. These years also deepened my understanding of human nature because I stopped looking only at western society as many do. In this way I could understand the process that western society has gone through in the last five hundred years of the modern era from a traditional-collective society to a modern-individualist one, including the surge of creativity, scientific advancement and democracy that has accompanied this process. The first book in the series, Cracking the Cultural Code<\/em>,<\/a>\u00a0deals with the different parent-child communication patterns in eastern and western societies and explores how this gap has been responsible for the different creative capabilities developed in these societies. My Arab students documented conversations between parents and children at their homes and my Jewish students were asked to “translate” this into their own “cultural language” and set down how these same conversations would typically develop in\u00a0their homes (e.g. someone took the child’s ball), and vice versa. In this way in 2013-4, wanting to explore further how to raise a creative child, I\u00a0created 160 short videos that present the principles for raising a successful\u00a0and creative child. These videos are on this website, for the time being only\u00a0in Hebrew.<\/p>\n I taught at Tel Aviv University in “International Masters (MA) in Diplomacy and Security Studies<\/a>” the course “Cultural gaps in Israeli-Arab negotiations and ways of dealing with them<\/a>” that is based on my book “Babylon \u2013 a Guide to the East-West Encounter<\/a>.”<\/p>\n
\npublishing house, illustrated by Dani Kerman.<\/p>\n
\ntwo distinctive \u2018cultural languages\u2019 were discovered, together with the\u00a0exact corresponding rules of how to translate from one cultural language\u00a0to the other. The second book in the series Dialogue<\/a><\/em>\u201d presents a dialogue between different cultural solutions to everyday difficulties of parents with their children with the aim of finding the solution that fits him or her. A student – mostly from the Arab Academic College for Education – presented to the class a difficulty that was taken from his particular milieu. A dialogue was developed in which the students presented their cultural solution to this problem while I presented the western solution to it. The third book in the series The Quran for Educating the Child<\/a><\/em> and\u00a0the Quranet Project<\/a>\u00a0that
\nhas been developed from it, together aim to help Muslims create a bridge between tradition and modernity by using Quranic verses to solve everyday educational difficulties (the girl doesn\u2019t want to do her homework; the child\u00a0wants to be in charge, and so on). This book was chosen to represent Israel at the President’s Conference, 2008. My last book in this series, Babylon \u2013 a Guide to the East-West Encounter<\/a><\/em>, summarizes this subject and shows the reader how to listen to and understand members of the other\u00a0culture and also how to speak the other\u2019s cultural language.<\/p>\n